Civil War re-enactors skirmish at Worcester's Green Hill Park

The Worcester hills were alive with the ear-splitting sound of heavy artillery yesterday as Civil War skirmishes erupted at the normally peaceful and pastoral Green Hill Park.

Deafening rounds of cannon fire signaled the start of the Battle of Windy Knoll, a fictitious fight portrayed by Civil War re-enactors dressed in Union blue and Confederate gray. The Union forces easily prevailed yesterday. They trounced the outnumbered rebels, sending the ragtag remains of their regiment scurrying off into the woods along a meadow-turned-battlefield, complete with “dead” soldiers lying face-down in the grass as their compatriots fought on. The rebels did not go gently into the trees. As the Union soldiers advanced, Confederate sharpshooters fired back at them through the leafy thicket.

The rebels were routed, but perhaps not defeated. One of the advantages of staging a fabricated battle instead of a real one is the ending can be rewritten at will. There were whispers yesterday that, when the battle is re-enacted again today, the tide of war may well turn in the Confederates’ favor.

The Civil War re-enactment and living history weekend, backed by the City of Worcester and the Central Massachusetts Convention and Visitors Bureau, features the “New England Brigade” and the “Liberty Greys,” two Civil War re-enactment groups who portray military and civilian life during the War Between the States. The action continues from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. today, with the main cannon-punctuated battle from 1 to 2 p.m. Events are open and free to the public.

Other goings-on include appearances from dignitaries of the era, including Red Cross founder Clara Barton, abolitionist Abbey Kelley Foster, Gen. Ulysses S. Grant and Abraham Lincoln. Visitors can stroll through tent villages, recreations of encampments that sheltered not only soldiers, but family members and others that often followed them on their long marches.

“In the Civil War it was not unusual to find lulls in the fighting up to five or 10 minutes,” re-enactor James Matthews of Gales Ferry, Conn., said. “In the hot weather, marching and firing was a very exhausting process. The men grew tired quickly and often you would have women come out with buckets of water to refresh them.”

Gen. Grant’s wife, Julia Grant, often was among those nurturers of the battle bruised, or so we learned from a re-enactor from Townsend who portrays her and happens to be named Julie Grant. “We’re no relation,” the modern Mrs. Grant said.

The general’s wife traveled with her husband on occasion, commandeering houses to stay in, or in undeveloped areas, staying in an encampment. “That Mrs. Grant would be at an encampment further away from the actual battle, but General Grant was usually at his best when his wife was with him,” she said.

Her husband, Sam Grant, portrays the Union’s victorious general. “I attended an event and fell in love with it and then fell in love with him and joined it and we’ve been doing this together for five years now,” she said.

Her husband has been a re-enactor more than 20 years. “Abraham Lincoln said to us ‘A nation with little regard for the past will do nothing in the future to remember,’ ” he said, when asked why he chooses to re-enact those tumultuous times. “We have duties in this world, and one of our duties is to preserve our freedom for ourselves and our neighbors.”

Mr. Grant has taken his General character all over the country, even to places that never saw a drop of Civil War blood spilled on their soil, places such as Oregon — and Green Hill.

“We know the war never got to Oregon but we also know that the history does need to get there,” he said. “We know that the war itself never got farther north than Chambersburg, Pa., but we have a responsibility to ourselves and our fellow countrymen to bring history of the conflict here because people came from here — Worcester, Townsend, Leominster, Boston, New Hampshire, Vermont — and went down there to preserve our freedom.”